A Sound of Sheer Silence

It is cliche to say that we are products of our environment.  Usually this cliche is deployed to talk about the family dynamics, and that's part of it.  But it is more than that.  We are all formed by the physical locations where we reside, the culture or cultures we live in, the specific events we encounter both directly and in the background of our lives.  These elements both provide insight into some aspects of life and hide other aspects or scenarios.  Most people to one degree or another work understand these formative elements and try to move beyond them, but I don't think it is possible to do it completely.  If you want to understand someone, it is important to understand what elements formed them, because those elements will make their mark on what they do. At the same time, I am becoming increasingly convinced that being a good person is an irreducible, almost existential quality.  In particular, I think being a good person is orthogonal to th...

I am writing this on November 6, 2024, a few hours after waking up to the see the results of the Election.  If you are looking for answers, unfortunately I have none to provide you.  Nor I do I have any sort of concrete set of plans. Instead, as I lay in bed unable to get back to sleep, I came up with three principles that I hope to follow in the days, weeks, and months ahead.  I think this is going to be bad, bad in a way that none of us who have lived our entire lives in the United States have ever experienced.  How bad, in what ways, we can speculate about but not really actually know.  For me, in this kind of uncertainty, what matters is having a set of priorities and clear principles that you can rely on to navigate your way through chaos.  So, here are the ones I plan to be using.  Perhaps it can be useful to you as you process and make sense of what has happened. 1.  What Matters Is Each Other.  I am not  a rich or powerful man by...

Last night, I attended--for a time--Maundy Thursday services.  It was the first time I had been to Maundy Thursday, or Holy Week services at all, since 2021.  The services were held at my new parish, the one I have been attending fairly consistently since the middle of 2023.  It progressed in a fairly standard manner for the first part.  Instead of foot washing, there was hand washing, in which each person in turn was washed and then washed someone.  I've never seen the Mandatum done that way before, but it was fine.  After that, they were going to do Communion in the form of a sit down meal.  The problem was that I had plans to go to dinner with Danielle after, so I slipped out after the Peace before everyone sat down.  Which was a bit of a shame, because I always found the stripping of the altars very powerful, and I missed that. During the course of my (admittedly brief) time at the service, I mostly thought about the fact that I hadn't been si...

Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you’ve always known. --From the Orange Catholic Bible, as quoted in  Dune , Frank Herbert Lead them to Paradise. --The last words spoken by Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) in Dune: Part 2 (2024) 1. This is not going to come as a surprise to anyone who really knows me, but sometime around late junior high I read Dune.  I had seen the David Lynch movie version a couple of years before and thought it was cool but didn't really understand it (not an uncommon reaction to that film, whether one is ten as I was or an adult).  Reading...

Exactly twenty-two years ago, in February of 2002, I was living in River Forest, Illinois, finishing up my undergraduate degree.  I was living in an enormous old priory, hoping that I would be able to join the Dominicans when I was done with school in the summer (which, in fact, happened).  The priory was built in the 50s, when the Dominicans would have classes of a fifty or sixty students a year.  Those days were long gone, and so I was the only person living on the hall, on the far other side of the building from the actual Dominicans.  Other than meals, I was basically living entirely by myself. In my evenings, after getting done with my homework, I had a ritual on weekdays.  I would turn on the radio to the Chicago rock radio station Q101 and listen to the syndicated show Loveline .  Loveline  was a call-in show, focused on giving sex and relationship advice to teenagers and twenty-somethings.  The hosts of the show were comedian Adam Corolla ...

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out ...

Pictures by Nick Hofmeister, Jon Achenbach, and myself A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of taking a trip to Ireland.  It was a gift from some very close friends, in celebration of my upcoming marriage.  We had a fantastic time, especially because it was my first trip to Ireland. Five experiences really resonated with me, and will stick with me for a long time.  After a couple of weeks to process the experiences, I wanted to put into words the ways that this trip has affected me.  Three of the five experiences have to do with churches; two (and really, three) of them have to do with dying to some degree, which is not all that surprising as I very clearly brought my Mom with me on this trip.  Most people would say that three of them have to do with spiritual matters, but I actually think all of them do, in truth.  And all of them are, in one way or another, about the past and how we relate to it in our time (or, at least, how I relate to it) One--S...